Keeling Curve

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Project Summary / Description:

ZIMSOFF was founded in 2000 at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in South Africa to deal with climate change, environmental, social, economic, food injustices and global inequalities. The purpose of our project is that ZIMSOFF believes in improved livelihoods of organized and empowered smallholder farmers practicing sustainable and viable ecological agriculture in the fight against climate change and emissions and we seek to influence policies and public awareness towards agroecology and smallholder farmers‚ rights in the fight against climate change. We are a lobby and advocacy organization made up of pioneering family farming members particularly women across Zimbabwe who are practicing agroecology and seed/food sovereignty as a climate change resilience strategy.

ZIMSOFF seeks to improve the livelihoods of smallholder farmers through organisational capacity building, mobilization and empowerment. It cooperates with a variety of stakeholders and allies to ensure that issues of food sovereignty, climate justice, justice and environmental justice are represented in several levels of decision-making processes. Our work further focuses on enhancing the practice of agroecology, creating agrarian reform aligned with traditional sustainable customs, seed sovereignty, and gender parity.

ZIMSOFF want to voice on these issues as a sustainable and just way forward for farming in Zimbabwe to address basic human rights such as access to adequate and nutritional food and access to clean water and air. It is backing up its advocacy work by strong evidence from the ground with a well thought-out communication strategy at different levels from the grassroots.

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Impact on Underrepresented Groups:

Climate change is real in Zimbabwe and other developing countries.This has mostly been affecting small holder farmers especially rural women, youths, climate vulnerable communities such as mountaineers and fisher folks who are around 65% of the rural population depending on agriculture for food security and nutrition, income and employment. In this regards women, youth and climate vulnerable communities's voices will be amplified and stories of change documented from the small holder farmers as a way of highlighting their cause to the wider Zimbabwean community. ZIMSOFF being a network of small holder farmer organisations in Zimbabwe has been implementing a number of projects towards building resilient communities that can adapt to climate change for sustainable and health food systems. In this regards, our projects seeks to empower the underrepresented communities in leadership positions and these also occupy influential positions in our organisation.

These programmes are modelled around agroecology and food sovereignty that protect the natural environment, ecosystems and feeding millions of farming families. In this regards, climate change adaptation and building resilient capacities of farmers should emphasise the need to address the importance of approaching food nutrition and issues in a sustainable, diversified and resilient manner through inclusive and participatory improved food systems and climate change governance frameworks in the country towards promoting social, economic, political and environmental justice as well as gender equality (leaving no one behind.

In the climate justice movement, these communities play a pivotal role in building sustainable food systems through agroecology practices thus the organisation is quite experienced in putting these groups at the forefront in implementing such projects around climate change adaptation and building resilient capacities of small holder farmers. 

The project seeks to support these communities in building their resilience capacities against harsh climatic conditions. This will improve agricultural productivity that is a source of livelihoods for nearly 70% of Zimbabwe's population. The overall objective is about supporting these communities with capacities to withstand uncertainties in climatic conditions and promoting biodiversity. It is also about reducing vulnerability promoting food and nutrition security that have been destroyed by deteriorating natural ecosystems due to, climate change, land degradation and by the 2019 COVID pandemic. The main working packages will revolve around capacity building, exchange visits, documentation of success stories for scaling up and engaging policy makers to create favourable policies for the vulnerable farmers.

We support these communities to be able to address issues of adaptation, reducing vulnerability, food and nutrition insecurity, food systems and climate change governance issues have to modelled around initiatives towards a shift in direction that favor empowering communities to build resilient, sustainable, nutritious, health and diversified food systems over provision food assistance in times of shocks.

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